Childhood trauma isn’t something you just get over as you grow up. Pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris explains that the repeated stress of abuse, neglect and parents struggling with mental health or substance abuse issues has real, tangible effects on the development of the brain. This unfolds across a lifetime, to the point where those who’ve experienced high levels of trauma are at triple the risk for heart disease and lung cancer. An impassioned plea for pediatric medicine to confront the prevention and treatment of trauma, head-on.

Objective: The purpose of this paper is to provide a clinically relevant historical and conceptual overview of psychotherapy as an introduction to a forthcoming series of papers on specific models of psychotherapy. The author offers a selective review of some key ideas in the history and practice of psychotherapy.

Conclusion: The principles of psychotherapy should inform all psychiatric practice, including the doctor– patient relationship, multidisciplinary teams caring for patients with complex or ‘treatment resistant’ problems, and patients who are non-compliant with psychotropic medication.

Psychotherapy (‘healing the mind’) is a particular type of interpersonal influence, wherein one person, acknowledged by society as possessing relevant skills (the psychotherapist) seeks to change the thoughts, feelings, attitudes, behaviours, relationships or personality of a suffering other (the patient):

If one posits that the relation between doctor and patient has been critically wounded, how are we to understand whether, and on what basis, that relationship may be reasserted ? AI Tauber

The pedagogy for engaging hidden values and divided selves is the moral building of the clinician as a full developed human being. A Kleinman

I do not favour the way Descartes ontologically screwed up a reasonable search for mind-brain docking during the past four centuries yielding life-denying monstrosities like radical behaviourism and an emotionless informationprocessing cognitivism… J Panksepp

The possibility of intersubjective knowledge offers a welcome relief from a forced choice between pure subjectivity (Descartes) and true objectivity (Kant). EM Hundert

The outcome of the game is to convert what would otherwise be a nameless trauma into a loss. J Lear

As a general rule throughout Asia, the more patriarchal the society, the more the Buddha looks like a woman: the more egalitarian the society, the more the Buddha looks like a man. L Shlain

Psychotherapists, especially, appreciate [that]… this painful ambivalence is as old as the ice-age, a hallmark of Cro-Magnon man, torn between his craving for consolation and his fear of revenge. J Cawte

Each of the above quotations may serve as a conceptual signpost or creative condensation of the argument each of the authors’ advances in their respective texts which bear on the nature, subject matter and practice of psychotherapy.

http://thestringer.com.au/deconstructing-schizophrenia-in-australian-aborigines-9049#.VHQ3_YE_7qB.
In places where an increase in the incidence of schizophrenia has been reported, these can be attributed mainly to substance abuse (eg Drug Induced Psychosis). However, there are additional explanations for psychosis differential diagnoses. The most important of these is stress, and especially complex or traumatic stress – presenting as depressive psychosis in both its unipolar and bipolar forms.

It’s often quite easy to see why someone might be low in mood, or panicky, or hearing voices telling them they are worthless. Sometimes the reasons are less obvious, and we arrange to meet again once we know the client better…

A typical person might have been bullied, neglected or abused as a child; subjected to domestic violence as an adult; and now be on benefits and struggling to feed and clothe their children.

These are metabolic enzymes, disruption of which can lead to metabolic syndrome, obesity and type 2 diabetes.

We also know that many (most) patients diagnosed with psychosis have a history of abuse and/or neglect, but these are the most likely to be prescribed “antipsychotics”, which ALSO induce metabolic syndrome, obesity and type 2 diabetes.

The CDC’s Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACE Study) uncovered a stunning link between childhood trauma and the chronic diseases people develop as adults, as well as social and emotional problems.